dead lives

by uzwi

I enjoyed very much Mario the Epicurean’s engagement with The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. It’s so nice to wake up in the morning to a thoughtful piece on a novelist you love. Thanks, Mario, especially for that last quote–

One’s sentiments—call them that—one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realise their power. That betrayal is the end of an inner life, without which the everyday becomes threatening or meaningless. At the back of the spirit a mysterious landscape, whose perspective used to be infinite, suddenly perishes: this is like being cut off from the country for ever, not even meeting its breath down the city street.

–which my inner life, still struggling with most of Portia’s problems, receives as a reminder.

And can’t help noticing how, in her Wiki entry, her extra-marital affairs with men are ‘affairs’ or ‘relationships’, but with women they are ‘lesbian entanglements’. Actually it’s quite funny, if also rather irritating.

Hi, Lara – extraordinary, isn’t it? Some people get very uneasy when emotions don’t fit neatly in a box.

I bought a second-hand Penguin of “DotH” in Edinburgh this summer, but never got past the first page: I started reading it in a vegetarian café, when I noticed the wall opposite me held a painting of a hanged man. I got distracted by all the incongruity in that, and left the book behind. Later, the lack of outcome made me wonder whether such an image from the Tarot hadn’t been alerting me to something, albeit in a dry, circular joke – who knows?

Anyway, if you’ve never read her, try some of the short stories, like “Last Night in the Old House” or “The Happy Autumn Fields.” She was so agile and assured that even good writers seem clumsy drudges in comparison – as Shaw said of T.E Lawrence, no more to be trusted with a pen than a small boy with a torpedo.

According to the jacket copy, Maud Ellmann’s “Elizabeth Bowen: the shadow across the page” deals with Bowen’s strangeness, including her “hallucinatory treatment of objects, particularly furniture and telephones”. My own tendency to the hallucinatory treatment of objects–particularly carpets & unwashed kitchen items–is probably what drew me to her in the early 80s, then. I’d like to pursue this–it doesn’t seem to me that Bowen treated objects in any more “hallucinatory” a way than Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor or Virginia Woolf, for instance–but that would mean reading Ellmann; & at £117 a pop she’s rather too rich for my blood.